Brace yourself, if you wish, for the rarest of all things from me: a mixed review of a book series. The majority of the time if I write a review of something it’s because I enjoyed it. After a lifetime of reading, I like most of the books I read, mostly because I know my tastes by now, there are lots of books, and for better or for worse I simply don’t experiment enough to be buying a lot of books that I’m not going to enjoy. I don’t like shitting on authors, either, so I’m not likely to write a review of a bad book unless I really hate it, or at the very least I think my dislike of it can be entertaining to someone. So mixed reviews simply don’t happen that often because I don’t feel the need to bother. The thing is, I read this entire series, all 1800 pages or so of it, over the course of October and I feel like it’s worth talking about.

Here’s the tl;dr: I enjoyed these books enough to read all three of them, and they’re certainly not bad, but worldbuilding and character issues drag the series down.

Spoilers, but only as necessary, and I’ll try to avoid mentioning major twists.

The series starts off well with The Bone Shard Daughter, easily the strongest of the series. Lin is the daughter of the emperor, who has been ruler of the Phoenix Empire for decades. The Phoenix Empire is a series of islands, and if this world includes any sort of mainland it’s never really mentioned. The emperor is a master of bone shard magic, which involves taking a small piece of the skull (!) of every citizen once they reach early adolescence. The shards are used to make constructs, which are basically Frankensteined animals. Instructions are written on the shards that basically constitute programming for the constructs; some simple ones only have a few but others can be much more complicated. Also, if your shard is used to power a construct, it will eventually kill you, and the construct will stop working once you die. Minor problem. I know. The emperor is stubbornly refusing to either name his daughter his heir– he has a male student who is also a candidate for the role– or to teach her bone shard magic, and a lot of the first book is dedicated to Lin sneaking around and teaching herself magic.

Oh, and Lin has lost a lot of her memory, as has the student, and the fact that he seems to be working harder to regain his memories is one of the points in his favor for some reason.

Also, occasionally the islands just … sink. Killing everyone on them, as you might imagine. It’s bad. But the main conflict of the first book, despite the presence of four other POV characters, is Lin’s relationship with her father and her attempts to get him to take her seriously. And the first book is genuinely good! I five-starred it, and I don’t regret it; it’s not until the second and third books that the series’ problems become more apparent.

Specifically, Lin becomes emperor through means I won’t reveal, and … it becomes real clear real fast that Lin doesn’t really know why she wants to be emperor, and she’s not very good at being emperor, and there are a whole lot– a whole lot, the refusal of the series to settle on a single villain is one of its problems– of people who think the entire dynasty just needs to go away. Lin ends the tithe (the process of taking bone shards) and in the process the book kind of unceremoniously abandons a lot of what made it cool.

The constructs are part of the problem. The book makes it clear (at first, at least) that the emperor is the only person who really understands bone shard magic, right, so the fact that there are thousands and thousands of constructs out there is kind of a problem, because you really feel like the guy didn’t have time to do anything but churn out constructs all the Goddamn time, and despite the constant harping about ending the dynasty there really seems to be very little that the emperor needs to do. Stewart seems to be aware that the islands need some sort of economy so that the emperor can worry about trade, and she’s invented two things: a stone called witstone and caro nuts.

It was never clear exactly what witstone was or how it was used other than people were constantly whining about needing to mine it (there is a running theory that overmining is related to the islands sinking) and it occasionally powering boats. Sometimes they’re very upset about running out of it. It feels like Stewart wants you to think that witstone is magical (and calling it witstone will never make any sense) but it’s basically just … coal. Like, I have no idea why she didn’t just call it coal, and if it’s different from coal somehow it’s never made clear how.

Caro nuts. God, caro nuts. Caro nuts are mentioned, conservatively, a couple hundred times across the trilogy. Islands need more caro nuts. Islands sink that were a source of caro nuts. Okay, I’ll do this, but you have to share your caro nut stash. Oh no they have stolen our caro nuts.

“Caro nuts” can cure “bog cough.” If they’re useful for anything else I’m not aware of it.

Bogs, by the way, are an ecological niche typically found in cooler northern climates– Scotland, for example– and not tropical islands.

No one will get bog cough at any point in the series. In fact, I’m pretty sure there is literally never an actual caro nut touched, handled, stolen, eaten or sold by any character during the series. We’re repeatedly told bog cough can be fatal and that people off-camera are getting it because it’s the rainy season. It’s completely off-camera. We don’t even meet any side characters with it. No survivors. No characters are, like, nurses or doctors or anything. The book just talks about caro nuts fucking endlessly because the emperor needs to be responsible for something and sure let’s make distribution of caro nuts a huge fucking deal.

One of the POV characters spends the entire first book searching for his (presumably dead) wife, who will never be mentioned or thought about again after the first book. By the third book he spends most of his page time hating himself, and really I didn’t blame him because he was annoying the piss out of me.

The first half of the third book is spent in a quest for a magical (sort of) sword, one of, we’re told, seven, even though only about four ever show up. The sword is tossed into the ocean in a standoff about five pages after it is found, and they were very much not looking for it so that they could destroy it.

Eventually two of the characters will adopt a “gutter orphan.” Every orphan mentioned in the book is a “gutter orphan,” which starts to feel really squicky after a while. I would think if Lin wanted to get the people behind her maybe opening up some orphanages might be a good idea, but the book is so unconcerned with the lives of actual people that it’s hard to really know how many of them there are. At any rate, the massive refugee problem caused by the sinking islands, which simultaneously kill everyone on them and create refugees, is probably adding to the number of orphans.

I dunno, y’all. The first book really isn’t bad at all, but none of the problems that you might find in it are going to go away, and while some of the mysteries get explained none of them really get explained in a way that helps— every unraveled mystery just leads to more questions, and the decisions the characters make get more and more inexplicable as the series goes on. Lin herself goes from being easily the most interesting character, to the point where I haven’t even really named anyone else yet, to someone who constantly makes the wrong decisions and then endlessly second-guesses herself about them. She changes her mind about something at the end of the series that she has literally been arguing against for two and a half books.

But there’s still some compelling stuff here– a lot of the characters eventually get animal companions of a sort, and they are universally a lot of fun, just for example– or I’d not have finished the series, and it wasn’t really a case of good will from the first book lingering on. Frankly, I’m looking for excuses to bail on books right now– my unread shelf remains entirely out of control. The verdict, ultimately: The Bone Shard Daughter is very much worth reading, but let it sit for a month or so after you read it, and if you’re still thinking about it, go ahead and pick up the rest of the series. Just be aware that you’ve hit the high point already.